“I think there was probably a big sigh of relief,” he said. Nagle said. “And we were very happy to be able to confirm that the spacecraft is still talking to us.”
The work scores high marks from NASA officials in the United States.
“The DSN people in Canberra did a remarkable job under the pandemic conditions just to upgrade DSS 43,” said Suzanne Dodd, Voyager mission project manager and director of the Interplanetary Network Directorate at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. ‘I have 100 percent confidence in the antenna, that it will work well for a few more decades. Long gone when the Voyagers are done. ”
Both Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 hold records for the farthest a spacecraft has ever traveled and for the longest mission. Voyager 2 has had some hiccups over the years, but he still feels around in the dark and discovers discoveries about the boundaries that separate our solar system from the rest of the Milky Way.
“I’ve seen astrophysicists with backgrounds in astrophysics now looking at Voyager data and trying to match the data they have from terrestrial telescopes or other space-based telescopes,” she said. “It’s quite exciting to go from a planetary mission to the heliophysics mission, and now practically an astrophysics mission.”
While Voyager 2 continues, Ms. Dodd and her colleagues are eliminating one of its scientific sensors, the Low Energy Charged Particle instrument. By doing so, the limited power supply of the spacecraft will keep its other systems, especially its communications antenna, warm enough to function.
Although it will reduce the scientific production of the spacecraft, the main goal now is the long life.
“The challenge does not lie in the new technology, or the great discoveries,” she said. Dodd said. “The challenge is to make it work for as long as possible and to send back the scientific data for as long as possible.”
The team estimates that both spacecraft could operate for another four to eight years, and NASA granted the team another three years of flight time last year.